History UsefulNotes / GrammarInForeignLanguages

* Have nouns with grammatical gender. French has two (masculine and feminine), German has three (masculine, feminine, neuter), and some languages assign "gender" according to whether the topic of the subject is visible, known to be near, or far away. Some languages have a simple animate vs. inanimate. Other languages differentiates gender by properties of the noun, Swahili has a different gender for people, animals, tools, liquids and so on.
** Or alternatively, are more gender-neutral than English, like the Uralic Languages. Imagine having "he" and "she" be the same word, as well as "him" and "her."

* Differentiate between the inclusive and exclusive 'we'. Compare the English, "We will beat them." to "We do not like you."

* And above all, do not have only and all of the sounds that are found in English. The pronunciation of even closely related languages like French and German can only be approximated by English sounds, let alone more distant languages, and vice versa: this is of course where foreign accents come from. Even a lot of conlangs still use English's horribly complicated tense/lax vowel system (yet many claim to have five vowels, while English generally has 12 or more), and some of the worse-done [[ReLex relexes]] and such employ English orthographic conventions as well -- writing ''reed'' or ''rede'' when the speaker says [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA /r\i:d/]]. And few if any conlangs employ ''more'' consonants than English possesses (which do exist -- [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language Xhosa]] and related African languages, for instance, have three entire groups of click-based consonants which have no counterparts in Indo-European tongues).

** Have many more articles than English. German, for example, has six definite and six indefinite articles that change depending on the gender, number, and case of the noun.

* Have nouns with grammatical gender. French has two (masculine and feminine), German has three (masculine, feminine, neuter), and some languages assign "gender" according to whether the topic of the subject is visible, known to be near, or far away. Other languages differentiates gender by properties of the noun, Swahili has a different gender for people, animals, tools, liquids and so on.

* Use [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_divider#Types_of_word_divider different methods for dividing words]] other than spaces. Many, such as Japanese and Chinese, have no divisions at all. Other options include interpuncts (Classical Latin), special characters at the beginnings of words (Hebrew), or even elevating the first character in each new word (Persian). German is also famous for not having spaces in its noun compounds -- though in reality, these compounds are grammatically more or less the same as English phrases like ''magical girl anime otaku''; the main difference is orthography (where you put spaces in writing), not grammar proper.

* Follow a different syllabic stress pattern than English. A case in point: when faced with an unfamiliar word of more than two syllables, English speakers tend to stress the next-to-last syllable, with a secondary stress on the second syllable prior to that, if the word is long enough. Other languages may prefer other stress patterns. Japanese, for example, often stresses the first syllable in a three-syllable word; the family name "Tanaka" is usually pronounced by English speakers unfamiliar with it as "tah-NAH-kah", but in the original Japanese it is "TAH-nah-kah". Word stress patterns are particularly in-ground habits, and it is sometimes quite difficult to adapt to a different language's "defaults"; writers creating a language will rarely choose stress patterns they find difficult or "unnatural".

* Have a different concept of "word" than what you expect. There is no agreement among [[Linguistics linguists]] on what constitutes a "word", or even on whether there is a universal concept of "word" that can be applied to all languages. Again, Japanese provides an example -- are the particles (''wa'', ''ga'', ''o'', etc) part of the word or separate words themselves? Most linguists say they're separate, but there's no shortage of transliterations that don't have a space there. (Japanese itself avoids the issue by not having spaces between words at all.)

** Have many more articles than English. German, for example, has several definite and indefinite articles that change depending on the gender, number, and case of the noun.

* And above all, do not have only and all of the sounds that are found in English. The pronunciation of even closely related languages like French and German can only be approximated by English sounds, let alone more distant languages, and vice versa: this is of course where foreign accents come from. Even a lot of conlangs still use English's horribly complicated tense/lax vowel system (yet many claim to have five vowels, while English generally has 12 or more), and some of the worse-done [[ReLex relexes]] and such employ English orthographic conventions as well -- writing ''reed'' or ''rede'' when the speaker says [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA /r\i:d/]]. And few if any conlangs employ ''more'' consonants than English possesses (which do exist -- [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language Xhosa]] and related African languages, for instance, have three entire groups of click-based consonants which have no counterparts in Indo-European tongues.

* Forms compound nouns differently. Most language put the base noun at the back, but there are languages which put it at the front. As an example, ''control CENTER'' would be translated as ''PUSAT kawalan'' in Malay language.
* And above all, do not have only and all of the sounds that are found in English. The pronunciation of even closely related languages like French and German can only be approximated by English sounds, let alone more distant languages, and vice versa: this is of course where foreign accents come from. Even a lot of conlangs still use English's horribly complicated tense/lax vowel system (yet many claim to have five vowels, while English generally has 12 or more), and some of the worse-done [[ReLex relexes]] and such employ English orthographic conventions as well -- writing ''reed'' or ''rede'' when the speaker says [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA /r\i:d/]].

* Use noun cases to convey the same meaning as English prepositions. In Finnish, for instance, there are ''fifteen'' distinct noun cases (kind of makes the ''three'' in English look simple, doesn't it?) to express various different meanings, but the use of prepositions is severely limited. For example, "talo" means "house," but "talossa" means "in the house," "talolla" means "at the house," "taloksi" means "into a house," etc.

* Have nouns with grammatical gender. French has two (masculine and feminine), German has three (masculine, feminine, neuter), and some languages assign "gender" according to whether the topic of the subject is visible, known to be near, or far away. Other languages differentiates gender by properties of the noun, Swahili has a different gender for people, animals, tools, liquids and so on

** There are a lot of different kinds of [[SesquipedalianLoquaciousness morphosyntactic alignment]], besides nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive. Some languages are ''tripartite'' (marking the subject of a transitive sentence, the subject of an intransitive sentence, and the object of a transitive sentence all differently), some are various kinds of ''active-stative'' (marking subject case based on whether or not the subject actively does something, so case marking is dependent on the meaning of the verb rather than grammar), and then there's ''"Austronesian alignment"'', which is, well, very confusing.

* Have a different concept of 'word' than what you expect. There is no agreement among [[Linguistics linguists]] on what is a word, or even on whether there is a universal concept of "word" that can be applied to all languages. Again, Japanese provides an example -- are the particles (wa, ga, o, etc) part of the word or separate words themselves? Most linguists say they're separate, but there's no shortage of transliterations that don't have a space there. (Japanese itself avoids the issue by not having spaces between words at all.)

* Have adjectives that act like verbs instead of or along with acting like nouns (kind of). For example, some Japanese adjectives can be conjugated just like verbs -- ''shirokunakatta ie'' = ''the house that was not white'' (''white-NEG.PAST house''). Sometimes this situation is described as "the language has no adjectives," which confuses the uninitiated—what is meant is not that the language doesn't have words like "red" or "large," but rather that words like that follow the same rules as verbs.

** Other languages may also have fundamentally different [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor conceptual metaphors]]. For example, while in most languages the past is "behind" us and the future lies "in front" of us, in Quechua and Aymara it is the other way round. Rather than likening the passage of time to the ego's journey from the past toward the future these languages liken it to a movement of events in a queue - the events of the future are lined up behind the events that have already occurred. (Though that should make you wonder about the English words ''before'' and ''after''!)

* Have no element in a sentence that corresponds straightforwardly to what Europeans would call the "subject." The topic-promotional Japanese ''-wa'' is a good example, as are dozens of Linguistics academic papers debating whether sentences in Tagalog (the most common language of the Philippines) can be properly said to have subjects or not. (Short version: the properties that a subject has in English can often be split up between two noun phrases in other languages.)

* Use [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_divider#Types_of_word_divider different methods for dividing words]] other than spaces. Many, such as Japanese and Chinese, have no divisions at all. Other options include interpuncts (Classical Latin), special characters at the beginnings of words (Hebrew), or even elevating the first character in each new word (Persian). German is also famous for not having spaces in its noun compounds—though in reality, these compounds are grammatically more or less the same as English phrases like ''magical girl anime otaku''; the main difference is orthography (where you put spaces in writing), not grammar proper.

* Have a different concept of 'word'. Again, Japanese -- are the particles (wa, ga, o, etc) part of the word or separate words themselves? Most linguists say they're separate, but there's no shortage of transliterations that don't have a space there. (Japanese itself avoids the issue by not having spaces between words at all.)

* Have adjectives that act like verbs instead of or along with acting like nouns (kind of). For example, some Japanese adjectives can be conjugated just like verbs -- ''shirokunakatta ie'' = ''the house that was not white'' (''white-NEG.PAST house'').

** Other languages may also have fundamentally different [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor conceptual metaphors]]. For example, while in most languages the past is "behind" us and the future lies "in front" of us, in Quechua and Aymara it is the other way round. Rather than likening the passage of time to the ego's journey from the past toward the future these languages liken it to a movement of events in a queue - the events of the future are lined up behind the events that have already occurred.

* Use [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_divider#Types_of_word_divider different methods for dividing words]] other than spaces. Many, such as Japanese and Chinese, have no divisions at all. Other options include interpuncts (Classical Latin), special characters at the beginnings of words (Hebrew), or even elevating the first character in each new word (Persian).

* Is written using logograms (Chinese), abjads (Arabic), syllabaries (Inuktitut), abugida (Hindi), or a hodgepodge of everything (Ancient Egyptian), instead of an alphabetic writing system. And not all writing system include the concepts of upper and lower case, cursive writing and/or punctuation.

* Is written using logograms (Chinese), abjads (Arabic), syllabaries (Inuktitut), or a mashup of the three (Ancient Egyptian), instead of an alphabetic writing system. And not all writing system include the concepts of upper and lower case, cursive writing and/or punctuation.

** The Wolof language of Senegal conjugates ''pronouns''. '''''Maa ngi''' dem'' means "I am going" or "I go." '''''Dinaa''' dem'' means "I will go [soon]." In this case, ''dem'' is the verb (go), and ''maa ngi'' and ''dinaa'' are both pronouns.

** The Wolof language of Senegal conjugates ''pronouns''. '''''Maa ngi''' dem'' means "I am going" or "I go." ''''Dinaa''' dem'' means "I will go [soon]." In this case, ''dem'' is the verb (go), and ''maa ngi'' and ''dinaa'' are both pronouns.

* Have adjectives that act like verbs instead of or along with acting like nouns (kind of). For example, some Japanese adjectives can be conjugated just like verbs -- ''shirokunakatta ie'' = ''the house that was not white'' (''white-NEG.PAST house''),

* On the written side of things, does the language employ an alphabetic writing system instead of logograms (Chinese), abjads (Arabic), syllabaries (Inuktitut), or a mashup of the three (Ancient Egyptian)? Does the writing system include the concept of upper and lower case, cursive, punctuation, and how are they used?
* Some languages use [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_divider#Types_of_word_divider different methods for dividing words]] other than spaces. Many, such as Japanese and Chinese, have no divisions at all. Other options include interpuncts (Classical Latin), special characters at the beginnings of words (Hebrew), or even elevating the first character in each new word (Persian).

* Writing directionalities different from the most common left-to-right and top-to-bottom, such as right-to-left and top-to-bottom (Arabic, Hebrew), left-to-right in vertical lines that run from top to bottom first (Mongolian), or even right-to-left in vertical lines (Chinese, Japanese). Beyond that would be ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon boustophedron]]'', which is used by no (natural) modern language. Then there are languages that can be written in multiple ways, or are leaning more towards left-to-right and top-to-bottom as a result of western influence.

Real human languages very often differ from what Benjamin Whorf has called "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European Standard Average European]]" in that they:

* Follow a different syllabic stress pattern than English. A case in point: when faced with an unfamiliar three-syllable word, English speakers tend to stress the middle syllable, while other languages may default to a different one. Japanese, for example, often stresses the first syllable in a three-syllable word; the name "Akane" is pronounced by English speakers unfamiliar with it as "ah-KAH-nay", but in the original Japanese it is "AH-ka-nay". Word stress patterns are particularly in-ground habits, and it is sometimes quite difficult to adapt to a different language's "defaults"; writers creating a language will rarely choose stress patterns they find difficult or "unnatural".

Unlike what you would see in many [[AliensSpeakingEnglish works]] [[ReLex of]] [[IndoEuropeanAlienLanguage fiction]], languages of the real world often work in wildly different ways, enough to make them sound like StarfishLanguage to a non-native. Most viewers and authors should find the languages in the Indo-European family, including, among others, the Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Swedish and so on), the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Romanian), the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian), as well as others such as Greek or Armenian, to have the most familiar grammar (and vocabulary too). However, even within that family there is a lot of diversity. The fact remains that a lot of languages differ from what Benjamin Whorf has called "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European Standard Average European]]" in that they:

* On the spoken side of things, does the language follow the same syllabic stress patterns as English? A case in point: when faced with an unfamiliar three-syllable word, English speakers tend to stress the middle syllable, while other languages may default to a different one. Japanese, for example, often stresses the first syllable in a three-syllable word; the name "Akane" is pronounced by English speakers unfamiliar with it as "ah-KAH-nay", but in the original Japanese it is "AH-ka-nay". Word stress patterns are particularly in-ground habits, and it is sometimes quite difficult to adapt to a different language's "defaults"; writers creating a language will rarely choose stress patterns they find difficult or "unnatural".

* On the written side of things, does the language employ an alphabetic writing system instead of logograms (Chinese), abjads (Arabic), syllabaries (Inuktitut), or a mashup of the three (Ancient Egyptian). Does the writing system include the concept of upper and lower case, cursive, punctuation, and how are they used?